Dear Adobe InDesign team,

As a professional typesetter/designer, I heavily rely on the text variables feature to automate running headers, footers, and other dynamic text in my documents. Unfortunately, there is currently no way to specify an empty or null output when a text variable evaluates to nothing. Instead, InDesign inserts the last used value or some default text. This forces me to manually adjust the layout or apply complex GREP styles to hide unwanted characters when the variable is empty.

Please add an “Empty Output” option to the text variables feature that allows the variable to output nothing at all when it has no value. This would be extremely useful for workflows where certain sections of a document may not always require a running header, chapter title, or other dynamically generated text. It would also reduce the need for tedious manual cleanup or workarounds using nested styles.

An “Empty Output” option would make text variables much more flexible and improve the quality and efficiency of our layouts. Thank you for considering this feature request. Given how critical text variables are for long document workflows, I hope you will prioritise this enhancement.

Best regards,
Talha